Achievement Trap: How America Is Failing Millions of High-Achieving Students From Lower-Income Families
From the time lower-income students enter grade school through the end of their postsecondary education, they lose more educational ground and excel less frequently than higher-income students, a new study from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and Civic Enterprises finds. The report, Achievement Trap: How America Is Failing Millions of High-Achieving Students From Lower-Income Families (68 pages, PDF), found that one-quarter of lower-income students who ranked in the top 25 percent of their class in eighth-grade math fell out of the top ranking by twelfth grade. Moreover, while high-achieving lower-income students are attending college at impressive rates, this population of 3.4 million students is less likely to graduate from college than their higher-income peers.
